LIZZIE FITCH/RYAN TRECARTIN – Priority Innfield

Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin. Priority Innfield | Exposición from La Casa Encendida on Vimeo.

http://www.macm.org/en/expositions/lizzie-fitch-and-ryan-trecartin/

Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal FROM JUNE 22, 2016 TO SEPTEMBER 5, 2016

Since meeting in 2000, Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin have established an expansive collaborative practice that includes video, sculpture, sound and installation. Their work plays with the immateriality of the interpersonal exchanges and relationships that characterize our age, as well as the daily self-performativity that fills the Web. They purposefully guide us toward a time when the connections between technologies and humanity have passed a milestone, but before the effects of this ontological change have been fully assessed. As Trecartin says: “I love the idea of technology and culture moving faster than the understanding of those mediums by people.”

Priority Innfield is a “sculptural theater” containing four movies and an ambient sound track presented in five pavilions. The movies, Junior War, Comma Boat, CENTER JENNY and Item Falls (all from 2013), unfold at a furious pace without interruption. Shot in a direct, quasi-amateur style, they explore the potential impacts of information technologies on communication, language and identity, and offer a barrage of frenetic images, absurd retorts and exaggerated poses and movements, drawn from a culture based on constant performativity.

By presenting their movies as installations, Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin create a fluid, open experience in a unified space sealed off from the rest of the world—all the better to underscore the phenomenological and semantic shifts that lie at the heart of their works.

Noteworthy

Exhibition organized by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and co-produced with the Zabludowicz Collection, London.

The installationPriority Innfield was produced and presented at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 and the Zabludowicz Collection, London, in 2014. The presentation at the MAC is its North American premiere.

Biography

Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin were both born in 1981, in Indiana and Texas, respectively. They graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and currently live and work in Los Angeles. Since their much-noted participation in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the two artists have produced an impressive number of projects, each more ambitious than the next. They have taken part in such major group shows as Younger than Jesus at the New Museum, New York (2009), and Il Palazzo Enciclopedico at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013). Their work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2010), MoMA PS1, New York (2011), the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2011-2012) and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2014-2015).